Aziz Ansari

For a guy who makes his job look effortless, Aziz Ansari wants you to know one thing: Stand-up comedy is hard. "It bums me out that people don't really respect stand-up as an art form as much as they should," he tells me, sipping a cappuccino at a trendy downtown Manhattan restaurant. It takes months to develop and refine a full hour of comedic material like his recently released Dangerously Delicious special, and when it's ready, there's no editorial feedback system to lean on-- except, of course, for the audience, who regularly text message, eat wings, shoot cell phone videos, and shout spoilers throughout his routines. Now that he's one of the country's most beloved working comics, it sounds like he's grown exasperated with the framework of the industry.

The new material he's bringing out for his current Buried Alive! tour hinges on the comedian's impending 30th birthday and takes a similarly reflective turn. Whereas he previously built bits from tales about palling around with hip-hop heavy hitters Jay-Z and Kanye West and riffs on absurd cultural minutiae, he now grapples with weightier topics, adding his trademark wide-eyed touch to material like romantic loneliness. He mines Facebook for ridiculous public displays of marriage and parenthood while confessing his unpreparedness for the same things, offering an insightful evaluation of the wacky struggles of the delayed-onset adulthood that has become commonplace. As he prepares to film the fifth season of "Parks and Recreation", we spoke to Ansari about hecklers, getting pigeonholed, and why the British respect comedians more than Americans.

Embedded content is unavailable.

Pitchfork: I tried to find some of your recent Bonnaroo set on YouTube and...

Aziz Ansari: It shouldn't be on there.

Pitchfork: It's not! The only thing that came up was a shitty cellphone video called "Aziz Ansari Watching Radiohead".You're pretty good about getting crowds not to film and upload your live material.

AA: I make announcements [telling people not to record my show]. That's become a weird thing you have to do now. I was just reading about Dave Chappelle, who did a show where people were yelling at him-- not heckling, but yelling out jokes they'd already heard. I remember seeing him in college, and people were just yelling "Rick James!" and you could tell he was thinking, "Fuck me, why did I do this show?"

But even though I tell people, "Shut your fucking mouth. Seriously, shut your fucking mouth. Don't say shit," I also tell them, "We know it's coming from a good place, and we appreciate your support." People just don't understand how that can be disruptive.

AA: You should really treat stand-up like you would a play. It's a one-man play. It bums me out that people don't really respect it as an art form as much as they should. If you're in a comedy club here, people are eating wings and shit. Texting. If you went to a play, no one would be texting during the show. Every show I do, someone at some point starts texting, even after I make a scene about it, saying, "Please don't do it, I'm begging you. It's distracting, please don't." It's nuts. If you're sitting there flashing a thing in my face, that's gonna distract me. Stand-up has rhythms, it's like a performance.

In the U.S., critics don't really come to review stand-up shows. In England, they really treat it like it's an art form, and it's reviewed very properly; I did Dangerously Delicious in London and read a review afterwards that was very thoughtful. Here, writers usually come and take three jokes and misquote them. Or they write a preview: "This guy's comin' to town! He's talked about this in the past, what's he gonna talk about this time?" I wish comedy were treated like the way it's treated in England here.

AA: Ultimately, you get your feedback right away with stand-up, more so than in any art form. You get feedback every second. But if you're a guy like me or Louis [C.K.] or Patton [Oswalt], it's a lot of work to do an hour-long show. There's not really any kind of recognition for stand-up; if you put out an album, you can get a Grammy or something, I guess.

Pitchfork: It's not like a ton of people are making year-end lists of their favorite jokes or comedy routines.

AA: I don't want that kind of approval, but I want more respect for it because it's such a unique art form. It's so much of one person unfiltered to an audience. I've been trying to develop movies and all this shit, and, god, there are so many people involved with that process. You can have an idea and you have to deal with a lot of people giving you notes. And then if you end up making the movie, there are so many other people involved-- the actors, the director, the editors. It's not one person's singular thing.

But with stand-up it's like: That's all me. That's something that I thought was funny, that I developed myself. No one can really tell me anything about it or be like, "Mm, can you change that? That doesn't work," because I'm like, "No, it works-- it just got a huge laugh."

"This current tour is driven mostly by fear: I'm 29 now, am I really ready to get married and have a kid? I don't think so."

Pitchfork: Your new material is geared toward tougher life issues-- aging, mostly, and entering real adulthood. Is that type of comedy harder to write?

AA: My first special was a lot of quick, small stories like me going to get sheets at Bed Bath & Beyond and stuff about my cousin Harris. On my new tour, I talk about three things: babies, marriage, and how hard it is to find someone. I could talk about those topics forever-- the easiest writing happens when you have a genuine passion for the material, or it evokes an emotion: anger, fear, whatever. This tour is driven mostly by fear: I'm 29 now, am I really ready to get married and have a kid? I don't think so. So it's about coming to the realization that a lot of people I know are doing that right now and how it's scary to me.

Pitchfork: At the start of your career, you could speak as an outsider to celebrity culture, but now you're inside of it. Did that shift change your material?

AA: The issue is more that I didn't want to be pinned down as "that guy who talks about his cousin and tells funny stories about rappers." It's aggravating how people just pick certain things about someone to be like, "Oh, that's his thing." But, in my first two specials, how long did I talk about Harris and rappers? Maybe 15 minutes. Some morning show interviewed Louis C.K. and made it out like his whole thing is cursing. It's not.

Pitchfork: Social media was a big focus of your comedy early on-- you had some hilarious correspondences with fans, but you've moved away from that, too.

AA: I'd rather focus on writing stand-up or scripts than Twitter, you know what I mean? What do you want to devote your time to? I never had the desire to be a professional Twitterer. Every now and then something dumb pops into my head and I'll tweet it. I don't feel any obligation to respond to everyone. Not that I don't appreciate people sending me messages on there, but there are too many. Responding to everyone would take away time for all the stuff I'm actually in the business for.

Pitchfork: You don't want to be pegged as the guy who's always talking about rappers, but there's your DJ-enabled Randy alter-ego, your appearance in Kanye and Jay-Z's "Otis" video (above), and the hip-hop references your "Parks and Rec" character Tom makes. Does that stuff stem from a real place?

AA: I grew up in South Carolina, and when I was a kid, all I had access to was MTV. And all that was on MTV was Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, "Regulate". But toward the end of high school and when I went to NYU, I started discovering more underground hip-hop like A Tribe Called Quest and Stones Throw. For those bits [about Kanye West] on the first special, that was just like a crazy story that actually happened. In my own life, I like that music and took on that role by being a fan of those guys in the same way I'm really into food and have become friends with chefs.

And then, for Randy, the whole idea was like, "What if Soulja Boy was a comedian? What if he was really aggressive about merchandising, DJing, sound effects?" For Tom, when I do a character for a long time, I pick certain things he'd be into. So early on, I was like, "OK, he'd be really into suits, he's gonna be into some colors here and there-- he's not gonna be shy about wearing pink-- he's gonna be really into 90s R&B, he's gonna be really into Soulja Boy.

Pitchfork: You're similarly affiliated with indie rock, too.

AA: I went to school at NYU in the fucking heyday: Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol. I remember thinking at the time, "Are all these bands really that good?" And now you look back and say, "They definitely were that good." I remember when I first got to NYU and the Strokes were just starting to do shows here. Now, I feel like I'm too slow to keep up with what's good. My brother is super plugged in-- he knows about all that stuff: Riff Raff, Action Bronson. But I've been really lazy about music lately. I've been running out of space on my MacBook, so I haven't gotten anything new.

AA: James Murphy is a good friend. I haven't seen the movie yet, but that was crazy. I'd never crowd-surfed before, and my friend was just like, "Let's run down into the pit. This is their last concert, let's not fucking sit up here like idiots in the stands." As soon as I ran down, people were like, "Aziz!" and lifted me up immediately. I was like, "Ahhh! Oh, this is fun."